Carols are much weirder than we think
For Vaughan Williams and company, carols were not just for Christmas
For Vaughan Williams and company, carols were not just for Christmas
Candida Moss invites readers to look beyond the Bible’s named authors and imagine their collaborators
The West — and America in particular — is suffering from a culture of self-absorption and self-promotion
Pan’s name is thought to derive from ‘paean’, the ancient Greek verb meaning ‘to pasture’. His half-man, half-goat form reflected his role in protecting flocks of goats and those who herded them among the wild hills of Arcadia. Panic was his superpower, freaking out mortals in the woods with distorted sounds, even neutralising hostile armies. This might seem like an adequate portfolio of godly aspects, but, as Paul Robichaud demonstrates in Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return, it didn’t take long for things to get more complicated. The Homeric ‘Hymn to Pan’ had a slightly different story, which was that the strange goat-child, rejected by its earthly nurse, got taken